From Social CRM to Social Business?

We have been discussing social CRM in many of our previous blog posts because social media has been one of the fastest growing and influential phenomenons for some time now, and for most of the businesses the topic is simply unavoidable. These days, consumers and communities have a substantial part of the online media in their possession. To appeal to social customers, are you required to transform your traditional business into a social business?

As we are talking about social business, we don't mean social (media) marketing — social business is not just about communication, it's about collaboration. Many companies are already spending a lot of time and resources in engaging with social customers, but to take it a step further and to add more transparency and collaboration into customer relationships supposedly brings more value to both parties. Michael Brito, a well-known and acclaimed social media strategist, defines social business as: "Social business planning is the blueprint for the transformation of an organization—bridging the external with internal, resulting in a more connected way of doing business and shared value for all stakeholders".

What this all means for a company is that connecting individuals and communities inside and outside your business in productive ways will profit all members. At this point, most of the business are involved in social media in one way or another. However, they all are on different stages of utilizing the power of it: some have just started while others already have a well established social media presence.

The shift to social business is seen as one step further from using social CRM. However, implementing social business strategies into your company basically faces the same issues as implementing sCRM; please have a look at our previous blog posts where we have be discussing in detail what kind of pitfalls it might bring.